Ed Gorman

Just noticed that Ed Gorman passed away. It's a damn shame, I'm sure there were more books in him. His work as a novelist, short story writer and anthologist has been great and revered by many.

As far as I know, I'm responsible for the only two Finnish translations of Gorman's work. I published two of his short stories, both of which were excellent. The first one to come out was "Layover", a thoughtful and melancholy look at people who got tangled up in crime. It was first published in my fanzine, Isku, and then it came out in Kaikki valehtelevat/Everybody Lies, the anthology of short stories that were published in my crime fiction fanzines. Then came "Scream Queen", another melancholy story, this time about some nerdy guys working in a video store and meeting the idol of their teenage years, the actor of many slasher films. It was published as a small pamphlet, with a limited print run and with Aapo Kukko's great cover illustration.

May Ed Gorman rest in peace. I know there are many people who miss him - my condolences to them. I never met him, but would've sure liked to.

Richard Matheson RIP

I'll probably be the last blogger to register the death of Richard Matheson, but he was so influential and so good, I can't let it to unnoticed.

I'm just dropping off to do some vacation-time, so here's only a short list of some of his work I've really liked:

Duel: both Spielberg's movie and Matheson's original short story plus his screenplay.
I Am Legend: unbelievably suspenseful, yet tight and relentless, very short (only some 150 pages), but still packs quite a punch, a model for many vampire and zombie novels and films to come.
Someone Is Bleeding: the original novella (later published in book form) reprinted in the great anthology American Pulp, goes to show Matheson was a very good noir crime writer.
short story "Gunsight" (Dime Western, 1951), published in Finnish as "Sokean sheriffin kaupunki" (meaning "The Town of the Blind Marshal"): hypnotic Western story of a blind hero.

Finnish publisher Kari Lindgren dead

My friend, author Tapani Bagge notified me that one of the last large personalities in Finnish publishing, Kari Lindgren, died recently after suffering from a strange disease for three years. This is a big blow to Finnish publishing, since Kari Lindgren did lots of books the other publishers didn't want to touch or didn't know how to handle them. Without Lindgren it's possible we might've never had translations from Joe R. Lansdale, Gerald Petievich, Lawrence Block, Richard Stark... He also did lots of vintage noir and hardboiled crime: Dorothy B. Hughes, Marc Behm, Margaret Millar (whose Like an Angel, one of the best crime novels ever, was published by Lindgren), Dashiell Hammett, Fredric Brown, Ross Macdonald and others, with some classic cozies thrown in.

One of Macdonald's early novels, Blue City, was also one of the last books Lindgren published. It's sad to see him go, but unfortunately his demise was expected.

Lindgren started out in publishing in the middle eighties, with his company called Viihdeviikarit. He wasn't always very good to come up with good names for his outfits, as Viihdeviikarit means roughly "Entertainment Dudes". Viihdeviikarit was a strict paperback publisher, with lots of titles coming out each month. They did many Westerns, from the USA, the Great Britain and Germany (the Lassiter sex paperbacks). Some of the Westerns were Finnish in origin, i.e. the Hulkkonen series by Kari Nenonen, and some others. They also published war and crime paperbacks and some porn.  In the early nineties Lindgren changed the name to Book Studio and reformatted his line: the books became larger trade paperbacks and the lines got classier, with interesting new authors and well-chosen classics, alongside some more obscure titles. He also published lots of movie tie-ins, which the bigger publishers do very rarely.

In the early 2000s, the large publisher Gummerus bought Book Studio, which eventually caused Lindgren to leave and start a new business. This time it became BookKari, under which Lindgren worked out some interesting books, but it was clear his energy was fading. One of the books was Synnyimme lähtemään ("Born to Leave"), in 2006, by Pate Riikonen, who later turned out to be Tapani Bagge and Harri István Mäki, who later on collaborated on a book I commissioned for the Arktinen Banaani publishers.

We worked together on some books. I did my first short story collection for Lindgren. This was a collection of the Finnish singer-songwriter Reino Helismaa's early stories, called ..ja Reikärauta-Brown ("..and Six-Shooter-Brown" or some such). I also copied some short stories and serials by Mauri Sariola for Lindgren to be published as books, and I proposed my translation of Jason Starr's Fake ID for him. He was interested, but for some reason or another he passed. (The book is now coming out from Arktinen Banaani.) We talked about other books and I compiled another set of Helismaa's adventure and crime stories, but Lindgren didn't live long enough to do the book. I also compiled a huge collection of Finnish pulp fiction stories (with a good grant), but nothing came of it. This was sadder news to Tapani though than me, since Lindgren published Tapani's first adult crime novel, Puhaltaja (The Jack), in 2002, with some other books of his and always offered translation work for him. Tapani said he lost a friend.

Robert B. Parker

Can I go on living my life without saying anything about Robert B. Parker and his sudden death? The guy who's said to have kept the private eye genre alive during the seventies and eighties? (What about James Crumley, Stephen Greenleaf, Marcia Muller, Arthur Lyons, Jonathan Valin, Loren Estleman, Pete Hamill..? They did nothing of the sort?)

I'm one of those who never got into Parker and his Spenser books. Admittedly, I've read only two (Looking for Rachel Wallace and some other, the name of which I can't recall) and both were translations. There just might be something in Parker's style that doesn't come out well in translation. In Finnish it's pretty flat. But what's certain is that Spenser feels like a bore even when translated. It tells something that the two of his books I read are the only Spensers translated in Finnish (his Chandler books got into Finnish, though, but I don't think I've read them). There's just something that doesn't resonate with Finnish readers, me included (and believe you me, there's lots of stuff that resonates with me and leaves many of Finns cold).

Okay, the books are easily read, they run along smoothly, but you never - well, I didn't - get a real sense of anything important happening. Well, okay, some of the classic private eye heroes got too mixed up in their cases, the cases changed them (Lew Archer, Mike Hammer, many of the later ones), but Spenser might be more realistic in that he just does his job, and that's that. Yet his macho attitude feels forced and artificial. I hate when someone makes gourmet meals in books and yaps about it (or pretends not to yap about it, but yaps about it inside, like machos do). It's boring. Parker was one of the reasons I have said that private eyes are no longer interesting - even though it's a genre I very dearly love.

The lack of Finnish translations may be due to the fact the Robert Urich TV series got here under a very bad title: Tough Game in Boston / Kovaa peliä Bostonissa. Even the first novel was translated under that title, with Urich in the cover. No wonder not many took him seriously. I'm sure the sales of the book were poor. I didn't much watch the show and can't remember anything about it. (I watched one of the Jesse Stone movies with Tom Selleck and I thought it was very poor indeed. It was the one with the happy couple suddenly deciding they'll kill some people.)

I do have quite a bunch of Spensers waiting for me in English, so I'll let you really know what I think of him. And oh, I checked: the other Spenser I read is called Ceremony. It was much more annoying than Looking for Rachel Wallace. (Checking the name of the other book I noticed that the other, older Robert Parker, the one reprinted by Hard Case Crime, has had one book published in Finland: Passport to Peril came out in Swedish from a Finnish-Swedish publisher Schildts as På död mans pass in 1952. Man ska göra nånting att hitta det.)

Tedd Thomey dead

Did anyone notice? Steve Lewis sent me, along with some other folks with a bibliographic bent, the addenda to Allen Hubin's crime fiction bibliography and there I noticed that Tedd Thomey had died in 2008. Quick Googling reveals that he died in December - and that he worked also as a restaurant critic!

So, who he? you ask. Tedd Thomey wrote some crime paperbacks in the fifties and the sixties, one of them being the excellent Killer in White (1956), a very Jim Thompson -like foray into a psychotic mind, this time working as a fake doctor. Pulp, paperback and film historian Lee Server has said good things about Thomey's hardback crime novel, And Dream of Evil (1954). His other crime novels, according to an early edition of Hubin's bibliography, are Flight to Takla-Ma (Monarch 1962) and I Want Out (Ace 1959; I think this was an Ace Double). There's also The Sadist (Berkley 1961), about which the Abebooks seller says thusly: "Mystery about the kidnapping of a guy's three-day bride by a man with a twisted criminal mind."

This seems to be the only complete bibliography of him in the web, and it leaves out the publishers and the years - but it's interesting to read about Thomey's early career!

Edit: Here's Steve Lewis's quick obit, with more bibliographic info!

Fred Grove dead

Western and mystery writer Fred Grove is dead. I haven't seen this in public, even though he died last September. I heard this news from Jim Doherty at the Rara-Avis e-mail list. I asked him whether I could use his post as an obit, but he didn't respond, so I'll be using it only in part.

Grove was born as Frederick Herridge in 1913 (he must've been one of the oldest pulp-related writers alive!) and his mother was part Osage, part Sioux. His father had been a cowboy and a rancher and his grand-grand-father from his mother's side had been Francis Parkman's guide when Parkman was travelling across the Nothern America (and later on wrote The Oregon Trail, 1849).

Grove was the winner of five Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, three for novels and two for short stories. He started out in the pulps in the early fifties - his first short story (that I know of) was titled "The Hangrope Ghost" and it came out in .44 Western Magazine. His other publishing venues included Dime Western and Max Brand's Western.

Best-known as a western writer, Grove wrote at least four crime novels, all set in the 1920's, that grew out of a traumatic experience he had in childhood, says Doherty, and continues at length:

"On 9 March 1923, at the age of 9, while visiting relatives in Fairfax, OK, he was awakened by an explosion a few blocks away. It turned out to be a bomb planted in the home of William Smith and his Osage wife, Rita. The explosion killed both of the Smiths along with their live-in maid, Nettie Brookshire. This was the latest in a string of confirmed murders, along with a suspiciously high number of unexplained deaths, that were plaguing the Osage Tribe, whose oil wealth had made them the single wealthiest population group on the planet. Due to a group of unscrupulous men intent on obtaining their oil rights, they had, in a few short years, also become the population group suffering the highest murder rate on the planet. The case was ultimately solved by a team of FBI agents. It was the first really high-profile case ever investigated by the Bureau.

"Mr. Grove never forgot the experience. Years later, while working as a reporter, he met the former FBI agent who had been the lead investigator on the case, and collaborated with him on a non-fiction book about the Osage investigation. The book never sold, but Grove would put the material to use in his fiction."

Doherty describes some of Grove's novels:

"Grove's first novel, Flame of the Osage (1957; paperback original from Pyramid), was also his first fictionalization of the Osage Indian Murder Case. Nearly two decades later, he returned to the case for two more novels, Warrior Road (1974), about a an Osage Indian who takes it on himself to catch the murderers as a matter of family honor, and Drums Without Warriors (1976), about an FBI agent masquerading a a race horse trainer (horse racing was another big interest of Grove's) in order to investigate the murders under cover. His last novel, The Years of Fear (2002), essentially a rewrite of the unsold non-fiction book so that it read more like a novel, was his final fictional treatment of the Osage case, this time with the actual names of the characters used. When the book was published, Grove said it was his favorite and most personal novel."

I've read only one book by Grove, namely Buffalo Spring (Doubleday 1967), which is a pity, since I liked it a great deal. It was published as a cheap and poorly produced (and abridged) paperback in Finland, even though it's a serious novel, not some slapdash shoot-em-up. Grove pictured American Indians very sympathetically. (The Finnish paperback's title is Buffalolaakso and it came out in 1976, as Montana No. 107.)

Edit: Should've paid more attention. James Reasoner mentioned Grove's death in his blog - and I even commented on it! And here's yet another obit from an Arizona newspaper.

Donald Westlake

Damn. When any good writer dies, there's always an outcry, even though the author would be, say, over 90 years old and it's no wonder he/she dies. But Donald Westlake - sigh, he was only 75. This is a damn shame.

I learned earlier today that he'd had seeing problems, to the point of being almost blind. I didn't know that earlier. But it's no wonder he died of a heart attack. No one who writes so much for almost 50 years (his first novel was published in 1960) can survive this life without a lot of stress.

But the stress and hard work didn't show in his work. It read as if he didn't put any effort in it. Smooth, elegant, but hard-hitting when necessary - especially in his Parker novels as by Richard Stark, but also in his first ones I really, really enjoyed like 361 and The Mercenaries (now in print as The Cutie from Hard Case Crime, which was Westlake's own title; nothing wrong with The Mercenaries in my mind).

The news of his death caught me when I'd just read The Hot Rock, the most famous of the Dortmunder novels, for the first time. Like anything he wrote, it was fluent and fast, yet full of fully developed characters. I'm not big on Dortmunder novels, but I can't but admire them.

I wrote about Westlake in Pulpografia. I'll be posting the entry on one of my other blogs later (not now because I've just started using a new computer and my old files are not uploaded here).

Here are some links: Peter Rozovsky, once and then twice, and Sarah Weinman (with a plethora of other links).

Eartha Kitt gone, too

In case someone didn't notice, singer Eartha Kitt died recently. Ted White has written this almost ten years ago, but it still works as a good introduction - and as an obit.

Edd Cartier dead

Just read that pulp illustrator Edd Cartier died during the holidays.

James Crumley dead

Just read from various blogs that James Crumley is dead. This is sad news, since it's not long since he last published - was it 2005, The Right Madness?

I haven't read that book, but I really, really liked The Last Good Kiss, which was translated as Viimeinen kunnon suudelma and published by Otso Kantokorpi's short-lived publishing house Jack-in-the-Box. I remember taking it with me in 1994, when me and two other guys drove up to Nordkapp* (and back!) in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle. I read it on the way up. (This must sound like I'm an adventurous guy. Far from that. But later on that.)

Other Crumleys I tried, but didn't get excited. I tried the one with a biker gang's boss asking Crumley's private eye hero, Sughrue, to find his mother. I liked the premise and it still makes me chuckle, but I dropped the book, when it didn't seem to go anywhere. Might want to try again.

It seems to me that the Finnish publishers have neglected Crumley's earlier novels, The Wrong Case and Dancing Bear, which many cite alongside The Last Good Kiss as his best crime novels. (Then there's of course One Count to Cadence, his first novel, set in the Vietnam war.) Might I suggest someone correct this wrong? (Well, it is true that without small publishing houses we wouldn't have Crumley here in the first place. First, Jack-in-the-Box, then Book Studio.)

* Nordkapp is the northernmost town in Europe. It's in Norway. There's a tourist trap in there, but we didn't get in there, since we didn't have any money by that time. This was before euros. We drove to another town and I changed my last twenty Finnish marks to Norwegian money.

Algis Budrys dead

Heard earlier today that American science fiction writer Algis Budrys has died. When I read the obits by Ed Gorman and Todd Mason, I was a bit sorry that my reading of Budrys has remained only with Rogue Moon. I didn't like it, but it was one of those cases when you just can't get into a book, no matter how hard you try. I'll have to try it - or some other Budrys - again, since Ed and Todd, whose taste I've found to be trustworthy, both like him so much.

Budrys is very little known in Finland. I've found only one translation by him: "The Distant Sound of Engines" from 1959 became "Moottorien kaukainen kumu" in the fanzine Aikakone 3, in volume 2. (It's somewhere around 1984 or 1985.) I remember reading this when I was a teenager and simply not realizing what really happened in the story. Haven't read it again.

(This must be one of the sorriest obits you've ever read.)

Zekial Marko AKA John Trinian dead

I just got an e-mail from a relative of crime writer Zekial Marko (also known as John Trinian) announcing he died on the 9th of May. It was also revealed that his birth name was Marvin Leroy Schmoker, which I don't think was public information before.

I also don't recall seeing any notice about his death before, but here's a short obit, which doesn't say much about his novels. (He wrote some half dozen crime paperbacks, one of which (Once a Thief) was translated in Finnish as Rotta ulos kolostaan in the Ilves paperback series. It's an excellent story about a criminal who gets out of the jail.)